Tentative mapping of comments to original article, corrections solicited.

One way to reduce the number of laws is to require sunset provisions on every one and the time to sunset be relatively short. This would require the legistlature to be review the crap they pass. Then they wouldn't have so much time to think up new stupidity and/or be out pandering which would mean they would actually do what they are supposed to do.
Term limits and golden salary and retirement package reductions would help too. This way, we get rid of the riff raff....maybe.

ah, well, nice to dream that something can save this country rather than a revolution.

"One way to reduce the number of laws is to require sunset provisions on every one and the time to sunset be relatively short."

The tax cuts passed during the Bush administration have such a sunset provision. They will expire soon, probably with Democrats in a clear majority in both houses of Congress. The irony is that the Democrats will do nothing and thereby raise taxes.

Consider that Congress doen't ever get its routine appropriations bill passed on time, depending on temporary stop-gap measures to keep the gubmint funded. So, if a sunset provision were routinely attached to every piece of legislation to which one could be applied, then how could they ever be expected to review and act on all the about-to-expire sunset provisions that come up each session?

Karma is a bitch, and a sunset provision is a double-edged sword. Meritorius or not, Congress couldn't handle it.

I came across this story a few minutes ago. It is about an incident and subsequent trial in Canada.

This excerpt amazes me:

"Parasiris still faces eight charges related to four loaded firearms he kept in his house, including the Ruger .357 magnum revolver he used to shoot Tessier. Parasiris had a license for the revolver, but not for the address he kept it at."

What struck me about it is a provision of the rules in New Mexico for concealed carry. A person with a concealed carry license cannot carry concealed a firearm of a larger caliber than the one he qualified with to obtain the license.

How does one tell the difference between malicious thinking and simple stupidity?

Bizarre, ain't it? My CCW license in Oklahoma says I can carry a revolver, a semi-auto, or a derringer. It doesn't say what caliber, and any caliber up to and including .45 is legal here. I qualified using a .45 ACP. New Mexico honors the Oklahoma license, meaning I can carry concealed there, but what caliber? If I'm stopped and checked while I'm there, what rules does a New Mexico trooper follow?

Yes, sunset provisions are a two edged sword, but I've been saying for years that on balance they are a positive.

Consider that if ALL laws had a sunset, that no, they couldn't raise taxes by just sitting. Because not only the tax *cuts* would have a sunset, the original tax laws themselves would have a sunset. If they did nothing, Americans would not have to pay taxes AT ALL. So no, doing nothing would simply not be an option.

If EVERY law on the books had a 10 year sunset, no more than 2 sessions of Congress could go by without them having to either pass it again or let it die. In a practical sense, the voters would have to approve the current body of law in toto a minimum of twice every generation.

And yes, we'd all be bitching about how it puts us at the mercy of liberal activists. And yes, they'd be bitching about how they are at the mercy of evil rich white Republicans. Neither side would get all of what they want. BUT.... neither side would be able to keep something they had passed back when they were strong, but was being challenged now.

It's one of those "non-violent reset button" provisions. The bad news is your enemies would be able to use it as effectively as you.

Of course, the problem is then that a lazy congress could just do provisions to automatically re-pass anything up for expiration, or at the very least have a habit of regularly regrouping sunsettings items into a single bill every five years.

I was talking about the reset button with my dad yesterday, while we enjoyed an early father's day meal together. I remarked that most people believe something because it helps them gain pleasure and avoid pain. Greater men are able to invite pain for a belief, but how many?

My point is, when gas hits $11 a gallon sometime next year, and the biofuel demand has made eating nearly prohibitive, how many normal people are going to vote for anyone and anything that promises food on the table and gas in the tank?

The revolution will happen, but the people themselves will vote for fascism or communism, not because they believe in it, but because the fascists or communists promise to feed them.

The problem with pushing the Reset buttons is that it makes EVERYTHING, good and bad, go away. As long as people have something left to lose, they'll put up with just about anything to avoid losing it. Revolutions are made by desperate, hungry men, and most of us aren't desperate and hungry enough.

Raven sez: "Beg to differ, John. The reset will not make the 'bad' go away. Usually makes it worse. Refer to any civil war- and note there are damn few that actually resolve themselves in an ordered society."

Well, the Founders pulled one off didn't they? But there's no such thing as a free lunch, to recall Heinlein. War IS horror, especially a civil war. But if the greedy/stupid/incompetent bastards who start them aren't stopped, the outcome is oppression, slavery and death. Churchill was right, sometimes you have to fight even when all hope of victory is lost, just for the privilege of dying a free man.

People have a misconception about revolutions, at least our revolution. Our revolution was not carried out by oppressed, harried desperate people, but by people who, thinking and acting before they felt, were smart enough to wish to avoid being oppressed, harried and desperate. See the works of Gordon Wood.

I wrote an essay sometime back on the contrast between the Germans of the Weimar Republic who waited until too long to strike against the enemies of liberty and our Founders who anticipated the tyranny and acted in time.

Remember that all of history is made by determined minorities, not sheep. In our case, the number of active combatants was a mere 3 percent of the population, supported actively by perhaps another ten percent. The British actually had more Americans in uniform fighting for them by the end of the war than we did. So what? We won, they lost and the Tories, mostly, left.

Three percent. The Spartans had the 300, we had the 3 percent. I've been thinking of having a bumper sticker made up that says, "I'm one of the 3%. Don't make me mad."

It may well be that our republic is past restoration. The only thing rarer in history than the establishment of a successful republic is the restoration of a decayed one. But even so, as free men and women upon whom the mantle of blessings and responsibility of and for American liberty have been bestowed by the sacrifices of previous generations, can we in good conscience do less than fight, even if the chance of our success is slim?

We are sheepdogs, and the wolves are at the flock. It's time to bare teeth and charge. Who knows, they may run away before we have to rip out a throat or two. We won't know unless we try. -- Mike Vanderboegh, PO Box 926, Pinson, AL 35126

Voting is supposed to be that mini-revolution. We're at the point where people are shedding blood because we're not willing to do the work it takes to maintain our system of government. Let's back away from the pitchforks, force our legislators to enact term limits and expand the use of sunset provisions, and see where that gets us.

Sez HokiePundit: "Voting is supposed to be that mini-revolution. We're at the point where people are shedding blood because we're not willing to do the work it takes to maintain our system of government. Let's back away from the pitchforks, force our legislators to enact term limits and expand the use of sunset provisions, and see where that gets us."

And how are we to accomplish that, exactly? We are becoming -- no, we ARE -- a despised minority in our own country. After the next election, it will be worse. As gunowners particularly, we have been shoved back from the free exercise of our God-given, inalienable rights for 70 odds years now. At what point are you willing to concede that we have lost the "democratic" (read majority rule) argument? If the Constitution and the traditional rule of law no longer obtain (cf. Olofson case for recent glaring example), then we are at the point where it's three wolves and a sheep sitting down to vote on what (or who) to have for dinner. That's democracy my friend, which is why the Founders mistrusted and despised it so.

Backing away "from the pitchforks", as you say, accomplishes nothing against collectivists which, though gradualist and Gramscian, our opponents are. The definition of crazy, they say, is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.

I have argued, politicked, written, and struggled to maintain the Second Amendment for 20-odd years now, as have many, many of my extended circle of friends. What have we to show for it? Regardless of which candidate is elected, we can expect the government seizure of control of the private sale of arms (read "gun show loophole"). Not even King George III was THAT grasping. If their tenuous reasoning for regulating gun stores is that they participate in interstate commerce (unconstitutional on its face, but give them that for point of argument) then how do they justify forcing me, who buys and sells wholly within my own state's boundaries, to seek their permission (and surrender my name and that of the other private individual to whom I wish to sell the firearm)with the always present threat that they can deny me a right that is God-given and inalienable? Yet they will demand it, and we will refuse. If such a law is passed, we the 3% will defy it, holding our own private gun shows and dare the Feds to attack us.

NO ONE you can find has done more "work it takes to maintain the system of government" than I have, and I tell you now it was a waste, a necessary waste, a ticket that had to be punched, but a monstrous waste. We are moving my friend, into one of those dark moments of history where the normal rules, held at bay by the Founder's creation of our constitutional republic, are going to reassert themselves. Those rules are the rule of man, rather than the rule of law, which is to say, the law of the jungle. And people are going to die. You would do better to resign yourself to the times we live in, remove the blinders of your wishful thinking and look at things as they are and will be.

They will pass more restrictive laws with the object of disarming us. The 3% will resist. You WILL have to make a choice. Wishing it were not so will be as useful to you and your country as King Canute commanding the tide to not come in. The collectivist Borg is coming, resist or get assimilated.

Now, contrast the behavior of the Germans to that of our Founding Fathers. This is best illustrated by reading Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, 1776 - 1787:

In the American Revolution, Wood wrote, "there was none of the legendary tyranny of history that had so often driven desperate people into rebellion. The Americans were not an oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial shackles to throw off. In fact, the Americans knew they were probably freer and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and hierarchical restraints than any part of mankind in the eighteenth century. To its victims, the Tories, the Revolution was truly incomprehensible. Never in history, said Daniel Leonard, had there been so much rebellion with so 'little real cause.' . . . The objective social reality scarcely seemed capable of explaining a revolution . . .

As early as 1775 Edmund Burke had noted in the House of Commons that the colonists' intensive study of law and politics had made them acutely inquisitive and sensitive about their liberties. Where the people of other countries had invoked principles only after they had endured 'an actual grievance,' the Americans, said Burke, were anticipating their grievances and resorting to principles even before they actually suffered. 'They augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.' The crucial question in the colonists' minds, wrote John Dickerson in 1768, was 'not, what evil HAS ACTUALLY ATTENDED particular measures -- but what evil, in the nature of things, IS LIKELY TO ATTEND them.' Because 'nations, in general, are not apt to THINK until they FEEL, . . .therefore nations in general have lost their liberty.' But not the Americans, as the Abbe Raynal observed. They were "an 'enlightened people' who knew their rights and the limits of power and who, unlike any people before them, aimed to think before they felt."

The Founders were people who believed in "preserving the spirit of resistance." To take Abbe Raynal's words to their conclusion, the Founders aimed to think AND act before they felt. Unlike the Germans, their "awkward stage" ended at Lexington green, and ultimately led to liberty. In the light of recent events such as the Olofson case, it seems plain that our own "awkward stage" may be perilously close to drawing to an end. There are those who still insist that such unconstitutional outrages perpetrated under color of law deserve nothing more than verbal condemnation or further attempts at legal redress in a "justice" system rigged against us (as if these thugs pay attention to the law anyway). Used to inaction and afraid of even voicing the threat of justifiable self-defense, these timid souls, these "summer soldiers and sunshine patriots," would have us wait for true tyranny before acting. This was not the way of the Founders. They understood that tyranny is best strangled in its unholy infancy, before it becomes a raging beast. They understood the threat, they prepared to meet it and, in the end, they defeated it. The Germans of the 1930s did not, and they were devoured.

I say we would do well to emulate the Founders rather than the Germans, to think and ACT before we feel, when it will be too late. This is important not only for those Americans who wish to remain free, but for those on the other side who unthinkingly seek to rob us of our freedoms and for those in the middle who (ignoring the Law of Unintended Consequences) sit idly by, content to watch the destruction of the American republic on television while thinking it has nothing to do with, and can have no effect upon, them. If we small "r" republicans do nothing else, we should let the rogue elements of our own government know that in addition to outnumbering them, we still preserve the spirit of resistance, despite have been marginalized politically by the two major parties. Perhaps, if everyone understands that, the Redcoats (now wearing black raid gear) will not once again blunder and unknowingly march out from Boston into an unexpected but perfectly predictable butchery contest.

By our words, our preparations, our training and our actions we, the armed citizenry of the Republic of the United States of America, still have the opportunity to convince them of our unyielding determination to remain free. It may be our last best hope to preserve uninterrupted both our God-given liberties and the domestic peace we have come to love too much. While it is better to be "awkward" than to be dead, it is better still to die fighting than to be enslaved without a fight. Just ask the Germans of the Weimar Republic. So THINK and ACT before you FEEL. The Founders did.

Excellent post. Someone who came to your blog and read just this would conclude you are a principled supporter of limited government and Constitutional restraint of political power. Now if only there was a candidate who espoused these outdated views, someone who had a history of voting based on these principles, not just giving lip-service to "freedom" or "liberty" or other words that mean nothing to most politicians. If only...

Respectfully, I disagree. At least in some respects things are swinging back in our direction, especially in terms of firearms laws. The internet is a powerful tool and other good-government efforts, such as Porkbusters, seem to be having an effect. From what I've seen, the problem is more ignorance and not seeing an immediate threat than anything else.

As to political activism and participation, thank you for being involved. For some people the only thing you can say is "Keep doing what you're doing; we'll try and get you some reinforcements as soon as we can."

Workinwifdakids: Thanks for the effort. Having tilted at several really big windmills in my life, I deeply respect those who proceed in the face of overwhelming odds - see, e.g., the Polish military forces who continued fighting like demons after it became clear that France was not going to attack Germany from the West.

Kevin, if there is an honest history written of these times, it will agree with your premise that the gubmint school system was the essential mechanism by which the American people were tamed, neutered, and fitted with their slave collars.

Each of us has a sacred obligation not only to resist the coming Night, but to teach the ones behind us the difference between Night and Day.

I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the system cannot be fixed, and perhaps shouldn’t be fixed. Not only does it have too many enemies, it also has too many internal contradictions. If we define the “system” as mass immigration from alien cultures, globalism, Multiculturalism and suppression of free speech in the name of “tolerance,” then this is going to collapse.

It’s inevitable.

The goal of Western survivalists  and that’s what we are  should not be to “fix the system,” but to be mentally and physically prepared for its collapse, and to develop coherent answers to what went wrong and prepare to implement the necessary remedies when the time comes. We need to seize the window of opportunity, and in order to do so, we need to define clearly what we want to achieve.

Two things - First, I heard all the calls for term limits, sunset clauses and the like...as if any of that will be the ticket to remove the boot of government from our collective necks. It won't. Sure, they might be good ideas but ineffectual nevertheless. We need a bill passed by the congress that would require four laws that are already on the books to be rescinded for every new law that is proposed. As it stands today, nobody really knows all the laws that currently apply to our citizenry. NOBODY! In effect, everybody is, more likely than not, a law breaker. A criminal in some fashion or another. Every election cycle we get a new crop of wannabe's that promise to go to Washington to pass new laws to fix all our problems. Those who are already on the gravy train promise that if we just give them one more chance they will get the laws passed. Frankly, I would be tickled to death if they kept their congressional salary and stayed home. In the long run it would cost us all a lot less. Moreover, it would prevent them from foisting any more "new" laws on us. And let's be honest here, the new laws they want to pass are supposed to fix problems that they themselves created!!! The irony is so thick you couldn't cut it with a chainsaw! The only way I see to get around any of this madness is to start repealing as many of the current laws we are now living under.

Second - The reason that the examples listed who had reached their own "line in the sand" died in vain is because they did it alone. They had had enough and died for thier principles, but they did it alone. Had their cause stirred the ire of a large group it would have been a bit different. Sure, the FedGov is more than willing to take on 50 or 100 angry citizens. They would happily kill 'em all to to be something of a warning to the rest of the rabble out there. However, it's when the numbers start getting high that they run into problems. 10,000 angry citizens is something all together different. Sure, they could possibly quell such an uprising, but at what cost? What I'm saying is that individual reset buttons are little more that suicide switches. The only reset button that would ever have a chance of working is one that fires many relays all at once. Not that I am advocating such things...I'm just sayin'.

Note:
All avatars and any images or other media embedded in comments were hosted on the JS-Kit website and have been lost;
references to haloscan comments have been partially automatically remapped, but accuracy is not guaranteed and corrections are solicited.
If you notice any problems with this page or wish to have your home page link updated, please contact John Hardin <jhardin@impsec.org>